Scarlatti also made a mark as teacher of singing. By many he is regarded as the founder of the Italian art of singing. This may well enough have been the case. A great singer himself, a fine musician in every respect, and fully imbued with the concept of _cantabile_ melody, as shown in the violin effects already mentioned as frequent in his operas, nothing could be more natural than that he should put the two ideas together, and seek to discover a method of training through which the human voice would be capable of similarly noble effects, with the added element of inherent vitality. According to tradition, he accomplished his task. At all events it was his pupil, Nicolo Porpora, who brought the art of sustained song to its highest perfection. Besides Porpora, who was perhaps his greatest pupil (and his eminent son, Domenico Scarlatti, who was great composer as well as virtuoso upon the clavier), the most celebrated of Scarlatti's pupils were Logroscino, Durante, and Hasse. Considering the importance of the period when Scarlatti flourished, and his own prominence both in the eyes of his contemporaries and in the history of art, it is surprising that his biography has never been exhaustively written. Such a work, carried out in the spirit of Spitta's "Bach," would amount to a history of the creation and growth of Italian opera, and would be of vast interest. [Illustration: W. S. B. Mathews] [Illustration] GIOVANNI BATTISTA PERGOLESE The measure of a life is not its length, but its productiveness, and the best of a life's work is in its quality, not its quantity. The history of the fine arts is rich in the names of those who ended a great career before they had rounded out two score years, and many of the world's triumphs in the open conflicts of battle on land or sea and of labor in the struggles of peaceful times were won by men who had not long left their boyhood behind them. Eminent among these young men, whose work and fame are to be permanently preserved and esteemed, is Giovanni Battista Pergolese, the span of whose life hardly exceeded a quarter of a century, and the number of whose compositions appears small in proportion to the influence he exerted and the new impulse he imparted to the musical world a hundred and fifty years ago.